Come in from the Cold
by Sanctuaria
Summary: "Are you there?" Post-Infinity War, and based on the Avengers: Endgame Trailer. Natasha and Clint figuring out what happened to each of them during the Snap, and in the aftermath Clint taking on the persona of Ronin. Four-shot.
1. Chapter 1

**Cross-posted on Ao3. I am very excited for Clint and Natasha to finally get the time together they deserve in Avengers: Endgame. EIGHTEEN MORE DAYS. **

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The snap can only be described as a sound. Deafening silence, just for a moment, in which the grasses cease to whisper against each other and their enemies cease spitting and roaring and and all the other sounds of the jungle of Wakanda are extinguished. It presses down on her ears, smothering.

For a single moment, all is silent.

Even as she struggles up from the final bands of earth trapping her against the ground, she knows something is horribly, horrifically wrong. She feels it in her bones, her skin, her very soul, or whatever tattered piece is left of it. She feels it the same place she felt it when Madame B informed her of the final task before becoming the Widow. She feels it in the same place as when Clint had first been taken by Loki. The same place that had ached the day S.H.I.E.L.D. fell.

Natasha jumps to her feet with electro-staves at the ready, but there's no enemy to fight. The moment has passed and she can hear again, calls and gasps of despair reaching her ears but coming from too many sides to follow.

So she trusts her instincts, the ones she has honed over so many years and so many deaths, and sprints uphill, trying to find the team. Dust floats in the air, choking her, clouds of it sprinkled within the close-set trees of the jungle.

When she finds them, it's only five and Vision's bleached corpse on the ground, the Mind Stone missing from his forehead. She knows then what has happened, as Steve collapses on the ground next to another cloud of dust.

"What is this? What the hell is happening?" Rhodes looks to him for answers, but the Captain is incapable of giving any.

"Oh, God…"

So it is Natasha who rallies them. Natasha who has not lost anyone, yet, because she can't bring herself to check her phone when the team needs her—can't bring herself to check her phone when she knows what she finds may just break her. She accounts for all of the dead except her own, forces her fellow Avengers and otherworldly aliens and everyone else who fought for their side to speak. Cap has lost Bucky. Rhodes, Sam. The raccoon, the tree. Okoye, when they finally track her down, T'Challa. Wanda is nowhere to be found. Tony Stark, and everyone else who took the battle away from Earth...lost. Status unknown.

They leave Wakanda in shambles, half its warriors missing and another fourth slain on the battlefield. The monsters, thankfully, have disappeared, but that is one small mercy on a day that does not believe in mercies. One Quinjet is enough to hold all that's left of them. Natasha takes the pilot seat herself, while the radio broadcasts confirm all of their suspicions and fears—that the nightmare they are now living in has spread well beyond the battlefield, the world in chaos as half its people disappear.

Only then, streaking toward the Avengers Compound and whatever bleak future it holds, does Natasha dare unzip her pocket and take out her phone. One press of her thumb lights up the screen. No new messages.

She swallows, once, hard, and almost puts it away right there, but forces herself to unlock it anyway, and send a message that he will probably not even receive. It's in code, their code, but she knows if he's alive he'll decipher it in a heartbeat.

_Are you there?_

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**Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear from you - even if it's just a keyboard-smash of excitement/terror for Endgame. Because, same. **

**Three more (slightly longer) installments to come. **


	2. Chapter 2

**Now to hear from Clint. Special thanks to Katie MacAlpine, suteko1, and BloodyNib for your lovely reviews!**

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Being an Avenger, shooting arrows at robots and aliens and targets all day long, okay, that kept him in shape. But farming? Back-breaking work. Seriously. Why did he buy a farm again?

His reason comes out the front door with an arm full of freshly pulled carrots, followed by his three other reasons, one of them barely able to stand on his own two legs without tipping over on that sloped front step.

"Cooper, help your brother!" he calls. His oldest sticks his tongue out at him but does as he's told, steadying the two-year-old and taking his hand.

"He's fine, Dad, he'll learn!" Cooper says back.

Clint wipes his hands on his jeans and approaches his sons. "I'd just prefer he'd learn without faceplanting into the dirt, Coop." He lifts Nathaniel off the porch step with both hands, tucking him against his chest where the toddler wriggles happily at the new high-up vantage point.

"They don't break that easily, you know," Laura teases him gently from where she has begun to wash the carrots off at the spigot just outside the house. "You weren't here for most of the first two at this stage, but if he falls, he'll mostly bounce, at this point." She winks. "Barton babies are tough."

"I'm here now," he says, careful not to squash Nathaniel between them as he kisses her.

"Ew, gross!" he hears from behind them.

"Dad, stoppp…"

Clint grins. "Stop what?" he asks innocently, leaning in for another kiss.

"EWWW," his kids chorus together. "We're going upstairs!" Lila adds, both of them turning and running back towards the front door.

"Great, you just lost me my help with these," Laura says, still smiling as she gestures at the mound of carrots.

"Guess I'll just have to help you instead." He sets Nathaniel down in the low-cut grass and starts helping her scrub the orange vegetables until most of the dirt is off of them. By then, the sun is fully risen in the sky. "At what point should we be worried we haven't heard from the kids in a while?" he asks, standing up straight again and rolling his shoulders from being hunched over so long.

"Knowing them, oh, ten minutes ago," Laura laughs.

"As long as they haven't turned the TV on again…"

Her face darkens. "It's been days since there was any news… It'll resolve itself. I know it."

He lifts his left pant leg, looking down at the thick band of metal strapped around his ankle and the blinking green light. "Well, not much anyone seems to want me to do about it anyways."

"Did you hear back from Nat?"

"Yeah. She said I wouldn't make much difference, whatever that means. And that they were headed to Wakanda."

"Do you wish…?"

His head jerks upward. "No. No! I belong here with you and the kids." He smiles wryly down at the tracking anklet. "Not like this thing could keep me here anyways." Clint looks her in the eyes, needing her of all people to believe him. "What's keeping me here is you, and Coop, and Lila, and Nate. Not the government. And that's just the way I like it."

She sighs. "I know." Laura dries her hands on her pants before beginning to collect her bushel of carrots back into her arms. "I am proud of you. And of them. Even with everything crazy going on in the world, they're still just brave, happy kids."

"Let's let them stay that way as long as possible by making sure that TV stays off," Clint grumbles. "If I see one more fear-mongering Fox News clip about how the Avengers are secretly in cahoots with the alien ring that attacked New York…"

"We should go check on them," Laura says.

The guilty faces when they arrive in the living room are enough to let Clint know that the kids disobeyed him. That, and the fact that the accursed TV is still on, news still playing.

"We just wanted to know what was going on," Lila says in a small voice.

"Yeah, we have a right to know what's happening!" Cooper agrees in a bold tone that shakes a little bit on the end of his sentences. "That's Auntie Nat out there, Dad…"

Clint and Laura exchange a look, and he goes to sit between his kids on the couch. Nate is happy on his lap even without being held, so he stretches his arms out to tuck his two older—but not as old as he thinks, sometimes—children into his sides. "I know you're worried. I'm worried too."

"About Auntie Nat?"

Something clenches in his stomach. "About everyone."

"Are they going to be okay?" Lila asks, burrowing into his side. He turns to hug her, removing his arm from around Cooper to fully hold her body to his, trying his best to reassure her when he doesn't at all feel assured himself.

"Clint?" Laura asks from behind him. There is alarm in her voice. He turns toward the TV, trying to see what she's seeing, and he _hates_ himself for it. Because he doesn't see her when she disappears.

"MOM!" Cooper screams, bolting upward from the couch. Dust hangs in their air in the spot where his wife just stood, filtering the sunlight, before finally fading into nothingness. "Dad, what's happening? Mom?" Lila is just shaking in his arms, eyes wide and uncomprehending. Cooper jumps off the couch and sprints to where Laura last was, shifting into dust before he ever reaches the spot.

Clint sees it this time, and it's almost worse than not seeing it at all. Almost. His son, disintegrating before his eyes… He's seen a lot of things in his life, but none are as horrible as this. There is a physical pain in his chest, tearing him apart, and the only thing keeping him grounded is Lila in his arms and Nate in his lap because

This.

Cannot.

Be.

Happening.

Nate gurgles and fades away on a phantom breeze, and then Lila is all that is left, precious Lila, whom he loves, so, so much, who the cruelest of worlds cannot rip away from him.

"Daddy, please… Daddy, please bring them back," Lila begs into his shirt, entire body trembling. "Daddy, do something, _please_, I'm scared, Daddy—"

He's holding onto her so tightly his forearms snap to his chest when she leaves him too. Staring down at his daughter's ashes covering his arms, Nathaniel's on his lap, Cooper's and Laura's scattered across the floor, something inside Clint snaps.

Not a Hulk-like snap. Not rage and anger and action. But a sniper's snap, stillness and silence and the sensation of being far, far away from all of this.

When Clint comes back to himself, or whatever bit of self he has left, he fumbles in his pocket for his phone, because _of course_ he should have thought of this before. Natasha, who will know what is going on. Natasha, who can fix what has happened here, because it can't possibly be permanent. Natasha, who he knows—knew?—will do anything in her power to protect his children.

There's nothing there.

She could be dead. He could be the only one alive left in the world, for the only reason of the universe's cruel joke.

But that thought is unconscionable, so he discards it in favor of a different one. That he and his family may not be her first priority anymore. He's felt it coming, looming in the darkness, ever since he retired and she chose to stay on to train the team with Cap. Once they had been partners, inseparable, with codes and places and people known only to them. He'd seen it coming in the secrets—their secrets—that were slowly stripped away, with each of their precious, private safehouses used and burned by various Avengers in need.

He could understand that in the moment, as much as he hated it. He'd left her, first.

But now...

He wasn't needed, she'd said.

No. He wouldn't be _useful_.

Well, apparently she and the rest of the team weren't much use either.

She'd promised to protect them. She'd convinced him that he wasn't needed to protect them. And so he hadn't. And they'd failed them all.

His phone buzzes in his hands with an incoming text, a foreign feeling on numb fingertips. Sure enough, it's from her.

Clint starts to laugh once he's deciphered it, the kind of laugh that involves no humor except that it's all you have left. _Are you there?_ So simple, requesting an answer so utterly incapable of containing all the pain, all the suffering, the absolute torture he feels within his bones.

He types back. _Not anymore._

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**Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear what you thought!**


	3. Chapter 3

**Special thanks to Katie MacAlpine and Guest for the reviews! Onward we go...**

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Natasha doesn't have time to decipher what he means for a while. The text is subsumed on the Quinjet by the radio Bruce keeps fiddling with, as if some channel is going to have good news out of all of this. No one stops him, though, and she doesn't have the privacy to slip away and call him.

She knows he's not okay though. He may be alive, but who isn't? Laura? One of the kids?

She's failed him. She's failed them all, and she can't make a call like that in front of the rest of the Avengers, as comfortable as she has come to be around them. Clint is different, always has been, even after they parted ways.

So she doesn't do anything about it until they reach the compound, until everyone is off her Quinjet. But even then, they ask her things, the younger Avengers looking to her for leadership now that the Captain just looks lost. She doesn't know what to tell them, doesn't know what she _can_ tell them; all she knows is she needs to be alone and she can't be.

It's a little ironic, needing to be alone when half the Earth's population has just winked out of existence. She's literally more alone than she has been her whole life.

Finally, she extricates herself, sending some of them to bed and finding quarters for the raccoon—apparently, his name is Rocket—and just generally dealing with all the things that need to be dealt with. Bruce can't sleep, so he volunteers to catalogue the dead. In between, she has managed to text a few more people, and she tells him with a leaden tongue to add Nick Fury and Maria Hill to that list. Then she finds the most secluded place she can, shuts herself away, takes out her phone, and—

And Cap is there, looking unmistakably like he's been crying, fresh tear tracks painted all over his face.

"Sorry, I—" she manages, so taut she feels ready to explode, because she can't deal with any more of anyone else's sadness and uncertainty today before she has a chance to deal with her own. Neither nurturing nor comforting has never been part of her skill set, never ones that was pounded into her like so many others.

"I don't know if I can do this anymore," Steve says.

She just stands there, looking at him, completely drained of anything hopeful or even rallying to say. "I need to go," she replies instead, and she knows from the look in his eyes he understands she doesn't just mean leave the room. He doesn't try to stop her though, doesn't do anything until she turns around and heads for the door.

"Natasha," he says as her fingers twist the handle. "Are you coming back?"

She knows what he needs her to say. "I will be," she promises. "And then—and then we'll figure out what to do next." Natasha doesn't want to be questioned further, so she slips out the door.

It's only once she's seated once again in the pilot seat of her now empty Quinjet and rising off the roof that she dares call Clint. It rings once, twice, three times before going to voicemail, a robotic response that does nothing to assuage her fears. She tries again two more times before giving up, typing out _I'm sorry_ instead and sending it. The words do not go anywhere near the depth of what she wants to say, but it's all she can do, for now. Setting the autopilot for the Farmhouse, she reclines back in her chair and closes her eyes, feeling the exhaustion set in. She has been awake for, what, thirty-six hours now, fighting off aliens and dealing with emotional trauma… Natasha sets the phone against her chest, just above her heart, knowing if he replies the buzz will wake her in an instant.

The phone doesn't buzz, though, and the plane's alarm is the only thing that wakes her when she's arrived at her destination. Her eyes are sticky with much-needed sleep, but she rubs it away as she sits up to look out the window. Clint's farm is visible out the front as the Quinjet touches down on the grass. It looks peaceful from here, like it always does—flag blowing in the breeze, plants freshly watered, house clean and cozy. Today, though, that image is a lie, one Natasha can barely stomach around the growing feeling of dread in her chest as she lowers the ramp and heads out into the sunlight.

Normally, there would be kids running out to greet her. Cooper and Lila racing, as always, and Nate struggling to keep afloat on his little toddler legs.

Traitor, she thinks, and she almost smiles.

No one comes running.

The house is cool and quiet when she steps inside, slipping the key to the door back where it normally resides inside her boot. The lights are off but it's brightly lit anyway in the late afternoon. The only things moving are Laura's light green curtains.

"Clint?" she calls into the silent house. "Laura?"

Her soft footfalls are the loudest sound around as she moves into the living room. Her boot scuffs across a dirtied floor, and Natasha feels like puking because Laura doesn't allow dirty floors. Someone died here, she thinks. Even the Barton farmhouse, the safest place in the world, had been touched by the snap.

But who?

Her eyes cast over to the couch. More dust, smudges on the cushions. Bile rises fast in her throat because there's so much of it, even hours after the event when most has faded into nothingness. She feels like Cap. _Oh, god… _

Her jaw clamps down, hard, and she tastes blood. Clint's alive, she knows it, the text on her phone proof of that. Laura is gone, or he would have stayed...they would have stayed. Home is not any less safe than out there, and the threat has passed now. But to keep his kids in a house where their mother or brother or sister had disappeared? That he wouldn't do, and it can be the only explanation for why he's not here. Otherwise, he would have waited for her. He knew she would be coming.

Natasha says a silent goodbye to Laura, to the farmhouse and all it represented, and leaves it behind forever.


	4. Chapter 4

**Last chapter! Thanks to Katie MacAlpine, Wonderous wonder, and TimeBlaze for your reviews!**

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It takes her longer than she'd like to admit to find him, but then again, he's always been good at what they do. But she knows all his tricks, all his trails, and she knows how to find him when she really needs to.

She doesn't know him as well as she thinks, though, because his location surprises her. She'd expect him to be halfway across the world by now, running as if running would do much good in this situation. There's nothing to run from. The snap is done, it's over, it's not going to happen again. All that's left to deal with is the fallout. And the consequences.

Natasha tracks him to a shabby apartment near New York's Chinatown, only four blocks from one of their previous safehouses, where she finds a mess of a bed and clothes strewn all over the floor and a very Clint-less living area for it being three o'clock in the morning. There's no sign of children's things, though, and Natasha doesn't like to think about what that might mean.

So she heads into the night, armed with a black umbrella and a long coat and a handgun that she hopes she won't have to use. Since the snap a week ago, New York's not proven to be the safest place, but it's doing remarkably well compared to some large cities adjusting to the new normal, perhaps because of its long history of recovering from alien invasions.

It doesn't take long to find him, not with the rumors running about. A man all in black carrying a short katana with slotted swordbreaker along one side. She recognizes the description of that weapon instantly, even though she's only seen it once, and knows its his. A relic from his time with the circus—the sword-swallower's sword, after the company decided they needed to spice up his act with something less medieval and more exotic.

When she finally sees him, she's walking along the street, and she sees the bodies first, lying on the ground with the scent of fresh blood mixing with the rain. She would know that stance anywhere, legs set apart as if ready to draw back a hundred-pound bowstring. The sword is in his hands, pulled against his sleeve as he wipes off the blood.

"Clint."

He reaches toward his head, lowering his hood and pulling off a ski mask. He turns around.. The light from the neon shop signs illuminates his face, pain written all over the blank mask it's set in.

"Clint," she says again, lowering and folding to umbrella.

"It's Ronin."

"Who is?" she asks, stepping closer.

"Me. Ronin."

"All right," Natasha nods, willing to play along for now, until she gets the answers she needs and can finally understand what he's gone through, what's driven him to this. She gestures to the bodies on the ground. "And them?"

"You should go."

"I'm not going. It took me a week to find you; you didn't exactly make it easy." She pauses. "Clint, what happened? Who…?"

"When someone is hiding from you, generally it means they don't want to be found," he grunts, sheathing the katana behind his back.

It's obvious he's in pain, it's obvious that he's trying to cope, but she doesn't know how to break through to him. She says it with the softest, kindest tone she can manage. "Hawkeye, report."

"Hawkeye is dead," Clint says bluntly. "I told you, it's Ronin now." He doesn't sound like he wants to say it again, but he doesn't need to—she recognizes that name, the one he was almost forced into legally changing by the circus before they decided that a moniker like Hawkeye was better.

Regimes may fall every day, but he is her partner and she is his, and they are still agents, still Avengers. In some ways she is still the Widow Madame B raised from infancy and he is still the abused carnie armed with nothing more than a bow and arrow against the world.

"All right, come on." She beckons to him with her fingers.

She doesn't quite know how, but it's a testament to their past that Natasha gets him safely back to the crappy hole of an apartment he's been living in. Once inside, she makes coffee, because even master assassins need warmth and caffeine sometimes and to be honest she doesn't know quite what to do with herself. That, and it's the only edible thing in his apartment.

He ignores the coffee pot when she sets it down next to him on the bed, where he's sat stiff as a rod the whole time she was making it. She sits down next to him. "Talk to me. Please."

"Nothing to say." He picks up the pot and practically pours the scalding liquid down his throat.

"Then I don't want to talk to Ronin; I want to talk to Clint."

"You got the text. Clint's not here anymore."

Natasha stood up. "You can stop the psychotic break cover or I can take you to see a psychologist. I know how much you love therapy."

He's silent for a moment. "Clint doesn't want to be here anymore." Her lips purse, and her heart breaks, just a little, even though she's been preparing for this moment since the second she knew what it was the snap had done.

"I'm so sorry, Clint."

"They're gone. All of them." He looks up at her, looks into her eyes for the first time since they've been reunited. "You said you'd protect them, Nat. You said I shouldn't go to help. And now…"

Natasha's eyes close against the tears threatening to overtake them. "I know." Her hand finds his and she squeezes hard. She is terrified for a moment that he won't squeeze back. But he does, and then she's holding him and he's holding her, and he's the one crying into her shirt. His shirt, actually, if he remembers back that far, but it doesn't really matter now. It's not soft crying either, but loud, broken, shuddering sobs that spread to her own body, wracking it with emotion.

Once he's all cried out—and, if she's honest, when she is too—they separate and are able to look at each other once again. "Nice hair," he says, voice wobbling, but she can appreciate the some semblance of normal he's trying for, even after his whole world has been shattered apart.

"I would say the same to you, except I can't." She says it with such a straight face that it takes him a second to get that a) it's an insult, and b) she's teasing him.

"Hey, you go dark, you change your hair. It's the rule of superheroes," Clint argues back.

"Is that what we are now?" she asks, lifting an eyebrow.

The mask snaps back on, just a little bit. "You, maybe."

"You were just as much an Avenger as I was, Clint."

"So this is a problem of my priorities?" he asks, anger lacing his voice.

"Of course not. Your heart has always been in the right place."

"Ironic that the optimist in you only chooses to come out when you find a friend surrounded by dead bodies."

"_Partner_. And I understand. It's not okay, but I understand," Natasha says, meaning every word.

His voice cracks. "I've got red in my ledger. And I'll never be able to wash it out."

"What happened is not your fault. There was nothing you or I could have done."

It takes him a second, but he finally nods. "This is monsters and magic and nothing we've ever trained for," he echoes, bringing her back to a world where the biggest threat they had to face was a trickster god and a little mind control that was nothing a good whack to the head couldn't fix. "I wasn't looking at her. Laura. When she...went." Her hand goes back to his, squeezing. "Cooper was though, and he tried to get to her, and his mother disappearing was the last thing he ever saw. Nathaniel just winked out of existence as if he'd never been born, and Lila...Lila…" He choked. "I was holding her, Nat, I was holding onto her so hard and she was crying and asking me to fix it and then she was just...gone."

"It's not your fault," she says. "And the team, what's left of it—if there's a way to fix what happened, we're going to find it. I can't promise anything, but...we're going to try."

"What have I got left to lose, right," Clint says, no humor in it. "What are you asking me to do?"

"Just come back," Natasha says. "I don't know what you've been doing or who those men were—"

"Chinatown gang. Offshoot of the Hand. And one was a girl."

"—but your _equal opportunity_ crime-fighting isn't much use to us. We could use you, back at the compound. I don't care who you come back as, Hawkeye, Ronin, whatever, but we could really use Clint." She pauses. "I could really use Clint."

He nods. "You have him."

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**Hope you guys enjoyed the fic! Only 6 days until Endgame and it's all contradicted by canon :)**


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